First responders are organizations and personnel that provide law enforcement, safety and protection services to the public. The first responders include law enforcement officers like police, sheriff, highway patrol, detectives, special law enforcement, FBI, DEA, military personnel, border patrol, and others. First responders also include fire and safety personnel, for example, firefighters, emergency medical services personnel, Red Cross personnel, hazmat, and other emergency workers.
The communications systems and associated command and control capabilities used by first responders in responding to an incident or other emergency are typically limited to agency-unique communication frequencies and procedures. As a result, the various different groups of personnel that respond to emergency incidents (police and firefighters, for example) are unable to communicate with each other. When different groups of first responders need to communicate with each other at an incident they typically use “runners” to relay information, or each group just performs their respective tasks and operates without any type of unified communication or operation. In some cases, inter-agency communications occur by relaying information through the respective dispatch centers. However, this is a very slow and inefficient way of communicating. The lack of inter-operable communications between on-scene agencies can result in ineffective coordination, often with tragic results.
Further to the very limited communications capability, adequate situational awareness is also lacking among the first responder personnel and among various first responder teams because there is no way to know the location of the various first responders at the incident scene without constant monitoring of voice communications. However, the lack of voice communications among the different groups of first responders means that the only situational awareness even available is that of the members of the same agency.
Integral to the lack of situational awareness at an incident site is the lack of an accurate system for maintaining personnel accountability of the first responders at an incident site. The typical methods used to maintain accountability of first response personnel are manual methods. In each of these manual methods, the principal is to use some physical means of identifying whether a responder is present at the incident scene, and in some cases to identify where the responder is assigned during the emergency. Because these methods are manual, they do not provide a way to accurately account for all first responder personnel at an incident site, nor do they provide ways to track the actual location or movement of first responder personnel around the incident site as the emergency unfolds. Consequently, the incident command personnel do not have detailed information on the location of the first responders and can lose accountability of first responders. As an example, the lack of intelligence at incident sites has resulted in the loss of numerous firefighter personnel (over 100 per year in every day fires) as well the injury of many others (many hundreds) in fires because the incident commander was unaware of the dangerous circumstances or lost accountability of individual firefighters.
The lack of adequate intelligence information and inter-agency communications at incident sites results in incident commanders and first responder personnel that lack the detailed information and situational awareness of the incident scene to effectively respond to an emergency. The cascading effect typically results in slower response times to emergencies and a much higher level of risk for the first responders and incident victims. Consequently, there is a need among first responders to have accountability of, and interoperable communications among, all responders at an incident site as well as a high level of situational awareness for the first responders in order to provide greater safety and more efficiency in the use of the resources at the incident scene.